The tower exists because of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, one of San Francisco's most celebrated eccentrics. As a teenager in the 1850s, she developed a fascination with firefighting, chasing Engine Company No. 5 to blazes across the city and eventually becoming their honorary mascot. She smoked cigars, wore trousers, and gambled -- behaviors that scandalized Victorian San Francisco but endeared her to the city's less conventional residents. When she died in 1929, she left one-third of her estate to the city for the purpose of "adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved." Architect Arthur Brown Jr., who had also designed City Hall, created the fluted Art Deco column that now crowns Telegraph Hill. It was completed in 1933, rising from Pioneer Park like a lighthouse over the rooftops of North Beach.

The tower opened during the depths of the Great Depression, and the Public Works of Art Project commissioned 25 artists to paint 27 murals on its interior. They took the assignment personally. Victor Arnautoff's City Life placed copies of The New Masses and The Daily Worker on a newsstand rack. Bernard Zakheim's Library panel depicted a fellow artist reaching for Karl Marx's Das Kapital. John Langley Howard painted an ethnically diverse labor march alongside a destitute family panning for gold while caricatured wealthy observers looked on. When Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads mural was destroyed at Rockefeller Center for including an image of Lenin, the Coit Tower artists protested, picketing their own tower. Zakheim responded by painting a figure reading a newspaper headline about Rivera's mural's destruction. City officials, alarmed by the leftist content, delayed the tower's opening. The murals survived, though some of the most overtly political imagery was quietly altered.

From the observation deck, San Francisco unfolds in every direction: the crooked switchbacks of Lombard Street, the steep climb of Nob Hill, the double spans of the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate stretching toward opposite horizons. Alcatraz sits in the bay like a stone dropped from the sky. On a clear day, Angel Island and the Marin Headlands form a green backdrop behind the shipping lanes. Few visitors know that the tower has housed a permanent resident. A small, unindexed apartment on the second floor was home to a series of guardians hired to protect the art and the building. Army Lieutenant William J. Bradley and his wife were the first, followed eventually by Tim Lillyquist in the 1980s, who became the tower's last live-in protector. The murals he watched over have been restored multiple times, though Lucien Labaudt's Powell Street, which runs along the spiral staircase, was painted over with epoxy surfacing in 2014 rather than restored.

Coit Tower has become as much a part of San Francisco's silhouette as the Transamerica Pyramid or the cables of the Golden Gate. It appears in films from After the Thin Man in 1936 to Shang-Chi in 2021. At night, the tower is sometimes lit in the orange of the San Francisco Giants or other colors marking civic occasions. Since 2004, artist Ben Wood has collaborated on large-scale video projections onto the tower's exterior, turning the concrete column into a screen visible across the city. But the tower's most enduring spectacle remains the one inside -- those Depression-era murals where artists used government money to challenge the government's values, and where the tension between public art and public comfort played out on plaster walls that visitors can still touch.